A Hero's Welcome: No soldier should come home without our thanks

U.S. Army Airborne's Ian Keyser, left, husband of A Hero's Welcome founder Sharon Hyland-Keyser, right, was honored with a welcome home ceremony after a tour of duty in Afghanistan in October 2007. The event was held during halftime of a Pottstown High School football game where Ian Keyser was a former standout quarterback for the Pottstown Trojans. Sharon Hyland-Keyser has since enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and is currently a lieutenant stationed in Beaufort, S.C.
(Photo by Kevin Hoffman/The Mercury)

Hours before the fireworks would erupt over Pottstown on July 4, 2007, woven between the marching band music and the swirl of stars and stripes, 25-year-old Sharon Hyland saw a still, somber contrast in the eyes of a Vietnam veteran.

She felt a deep pang in her chest.

"I remember seeing the different generations of veterans" go marching by in Pottstown's annual Fourth of July parade," she said. There was something different about the way the Vietnam veterans carried themselves. "And I thought, 'Shame on us that we ever let our heroes come home from a war without our thanks.'"

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Aware she couldn't undo what had been done to those American heroes, Hyland set out to do the next best thing she could think of: "Make sure we never have a situation again like our Vietnam veterans came home to, and that was by creating A Hero's Welcome."

Hyland's goal for the organization was to welcome home members of the armed forces when they returned to their families and friends after serving their country. She envisioned ticker-tape parades for every soldier, Marine, sailor, airman and Coast Guardsman. What she would come to realize was there were many others out there just like her determined to achieve the same goal.

The Warriors' Watch Riders was founded in Pennsylvania less than a year after that Fourth of July parade. The organization would also look to gain attention for its cause, and early on acquired a few hundred members with growling steel horses to make a whole lot of noise. The Warriors' Watch Riders would help provide escorts for homecoming heroes, often meeting the hero as he or she stepped off the plane.

A Hero's Welcome and the Warriors' Watch Riders would soon become sister organizations, forming a family tree that would take root around the country.

When the idea for A Hero's Welcome was conceived in July 2007, the U.S. was involved in an unpopular war. Hyland made it very clear that her vision for an organization to support the troops was not going to be pushed or pulled in any political direction.

"I wanted to make sure people weren't going to come out to support a certain politician or a certain president," she said. "I wanted people who were out to support the troops, and that was it." She noted that heroes who enlist today, like those who were drafted during the Vietnam War, don't choose the wars they fight in; their choice is solely to serve their country.

With that in mind, Hyland began searching for how to get her organization off the ground. In the beginning, she was a one-woman operation.

"My first welcome home was me literally by myself standing with a flag at Philadelphia International Airport," she recalled. She waited for servicemen and servicewomen who were returning home to their families. When she saw one, she offered her thanks.

Seeing the gratitude, shock and humility in the eyes of those returning heroes, Hyland was hooked. "You feel like such a good American to thank these families," she said. "You get addicted to that feeling and want to do it again and again."

In September 2007, Hyland organized the first of what would become more than a thousand large-scale welcome home celebrations. Two Marines, graduates of local high schools, were greeted by hundreds of football fans and patriots as they stood at the Pottsgrove High School football field for the coin toss at a Friday night game.

Aaron Martin, a 2001 graduate of Pottsgrove High School, and Patrick Smith, a 2005 graduate of Boyertown Area High School, had both recently returned from serving in Iraq. "I thought it was just going to be a bunch of friends at my house. Then I came here, and people are coming out of the woodwork," Martin said that evening, explaining he was picked up at the airport hours before the kickoff. "It's amazing. I'm enjoying every bit of it."

Not too long after that first celebration, Hyland and A Hero's Welcome hooked up with Wayne Lutz and the Warriors' Watch Riders.

Lutz, a Vietnam veteran, said he founded the organization, "a motorcycle-centric group," comprised of veterans and nonveterans, some who own and ride motorcycles as well as some who don't, "to make sure what happened to us 40 years ago never happens again." Although Lutz joined the Army in 1972 at age 18 and his intent was to go to Vietnam, by the time he finished his training, "it was early 1973 and the war was over."

Lutz served six years in Germany with the Army, and after about 10 years of total service, he decided to get out of the Army and settle down with his family.

He recalled how servicemen during the Vietnam era were discouraged from wearing their uniforms in public.

"Back then, the hatred that that generation had for the war, they transferred that directly to the soldier and blamed him for that," Lutz said. "No matter what, those troops were giving their lives for a country that didn't give a damn about them. ... It's a horrible thing for any young kid, and you're talking young, 18-, 19-year-old kids, to go through that kind of scorn and derision."

That's the memory Lutz keeps in mind during every welcome home he participates in.

Often the Warriors' Watch Riders and A Hero's Welcome operate hand in hand. "They're the thunder and we're the lightning," Hyland said, describing the relationship between the two groups. The Warriors' Watch Riders "bring the thunder with their motorcycles."

Lutz said the motorcycles are an integral part of drawing attention to the troops, primarily because they're loud. "The only thing that draws attention more than a motorcycle is a lot of motorcycles," he said.

Lutz said the men and women he's met have faced their welcome home celebrations with humble hearts. "It's always the same," he said. "They're always extremely humble. 'I don't deserve this.' But you do deserve this by the very fact of raising your hand," Lutz said. "I always tell them, when I'm dead and they're old and gray, to pay it forward. You and I know that 40 years from now, there will be another war" and with it will come more young men and women laying their lives on the line who will need to be welcomed home.

Hyland, who quit her job to focus on A Hero's Welcome full-time, said she felt purpose welcoming home men and women who had sacrificed a part of their lives for their country. Working side by side with the Warriors' Watch Riders was perfect, she said. But something was still missing in her own life.

Inspired by the heroes she met in the early months of A Hero's Welcome's existence, Hyland was reminded of her own earlier ambition to serve her country. The daughter, sister, granddaughter and niece of Marines, she wanted to serve in that capacity, too. "I always wanted to be a Marine and had gone through officer candidate school in 1999 and 2000 ... but was sent home before graduation after an injury," she explained.

Seeing the sacrifices others had made, Hyland said she got real with herself. "I said, OK, I'm still young enough and able-bodied enough to serve," she said.

She enlisted.

Her mother, Maria Hyland, a mother of four who works full time with her husband in the business they own, Hyland Technologies, in Frederick, decided the mission of A Hero's Welcome was too important to be left undone. Maria Hyland grabbed the baton from her daughter and ran with it. She hasn't looked back.

Maria Hyland didn't realize how much work she was taking on until she was up to her ears in it.

As more homecomings were complete, more people heard about the welcome home celebrations and wanted a celebration for their family members or friends. Those homecomings, in turn, brought more attention to A Hero's Welcome, and the organization began to spread and grow at an incredible pace.

"It really is a 24-hour-a-day job," Maria Hyland said, between checking email, working to help people from all over the country establish their own chapters, and coordinating with the Warriors' Watch Riders organizing homecomings throughout southeastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

"The thing that keeps me going is when you see the hero uniting with their family," Hyland said. Sometimes she gets to see such reunions five or more times a week, jetting from one welcome home to the next, from city to city and sometimes from state to state.

A Hero's Welcome now has chapters all over the country. The Warriors' Watch Riders has also grown from its small beginnings to more than 5,000 members from northern California, to northwestern Florida to New Jersey.

Although the response to the organizations has been an overwhelmingly positive one, not all aspects of the work they do are fun or easy. Not all homecomings are happy ones.

A Hero's Welcome and the Warriors' Watch Riders have also been called upon by families whose loved ones were killed in action. It's not uncommon for the Warriors' Watch Riders and A Hero's Welcome to receive requests to rally at funerals of veterans.

Those moments truly define why it's important to thank our veterans and our servicemen and women when we can, according to Lutz. He said one of the most profound moments of his welcome-home experiences came while waiting for an arriving soldier at Philadelphia International Airport.

"We were lined up on the escalator," Lutz said, describing the gauntlet of flags being carried by the Warriors' Watch Riders and members of A Hero's Welcome as they waited for the homebound soldier.

"At the next baggage area was a uniformed soldier, so as we were waiting, I went to talk to him," Lutz continued. "I realized it was a staff sergeant and he was an escort and he was escorting the parents of a fallen soldier from Tennessee to Dover, Del., to pick up the body of their son.

"Here we are, greeting a live soldier coming home, and on the other side was a soldier coming home in a very different way," Lutz said. "If there was ever a poignant moment, that was it."

In contrast to the often emotional tributes, Lutz has also witnessed some soldiers who come home changed and unable to handle a welcome. The contrast between where they just spent a year or more of their life is too stark when held up next to the celebration of their homecoming.

"You sit in the arrival area of these airports and you see these soldiers, these children in uniform, they may literally have the dust of Afghanistan on their boots, they've come from this sun-bleached, hot environment, where most everyone they meet may want to kill them," Lutz said. "The transition home is jarring, and it can be hard for some of them to take."

It can also be difficult for servicemen who've had comrades not make it home alive to accept being called a hero. "A lot of them think 'We didn't do anything heroic,'" Lutz said. "Many of them haven't seen combat, but what I tell them if I have the opportunity to talk to them ... is 'When you raised your hand and took that oath, you took that oath knowing it could cost you your life. That makes you a hero.'"

Seen through the eyes of his mother Michele Rooney, Cpl. Gary Anoushian will always be first, her baby, and second, a Marine.

Rooney of Gilbertsville said her son first mentioned he wanted to be a Marine at the age of 8. "Alright, Gar," she recalled thinking to herself. He was only 8, how did he know he wanted to be a Marine?

But then, when Anoushian graduated from Boyertown Area High School in 2004, he was still talking about becoming a Marine.

"Initially he told me he met with a recruiter," Rooney said, the memory of the conversation that followed rushing back to her. "I said to him, he needed to be clear, he needed to know that joining the Marine Corps meant he was willing to give his life for his country."

Rooney wanted her son to know that making such a commitment wasn't something that should be taken lightly and she also didn't want him to enlist for the education, the money or any other reason that fell in the periphery. Serving, she said, was about sacrifice for one's country, and potentially the sacrifice of their life.

Rooney said her son mulled over their conversation and decided becoming a Marine was still what he wanted.

In May 2007, Anoushian graduated from the Marine Corps Recruit Depot at Parris Island, S.C.

A year later, in April 2008, he was deployed to Iraq.

"The first deployment was hard," Rooney recalled, not quite letting herself go completely back to that place of fear. Realizing her son would likely go off to war was something she had thought about so many times, but when the time came for him to actually go, the reality set in. Rooney said she was scared "to death."

While Anoushian was deployed, he hadn't gotten his absentee ballot to vote in the 2008 presidential election. While volunteering at a candidate phone bank, Rooney was talking to someone about the problem her son was having getting a ballot, and Maria Hyland overheard the conversation and came over.

"I think it was divine intervention, being at the right place at the right time" Rooney said of their chance meeting. Rooney said she had never volunteered at a phone bank before, and of all places to volunteer for the first time, it was the same place Maria Hyland was volunteering. "Maria introduced herself and gave me her card." Although Hyland couldn't help with the absentee ballot, she told Rooney to get in touch when Anoushian came home.

"I felt a connection with her," Rooney said. She went home and put Hyland's card on her refrigerator. In December 2008, Rooney got 48 hours' notice that her son was coming home. She walked by the refrigerator and spotted Hyland's card. In less than two days, Hyland and A Hero's Welcome and the Warriors' Watch Riders pulled together a welcome home for Anoushian. In a snowstorm, several motorcycles and a large group of supporters made it to the airport to welcome Anoushian home.

"To see those people at the airport that were so willing to give of their time and be there to welcome home my son, I immediately felt like 'sign us up,'" Rooney said. "We were so grateful for A Hero's Welcome and the Warriors' Watch Riders."

Back then, Rooney's husband Tim, had a motorcycle but "it was for sale," she recalled. Rooney admitted she influenced the decision to put the bike up for sale because of safety concerns, "and at that moment" when the Warriors' Watch Riders were there to greet her son, "I thought, OK, Tim can keep the bike." She realized she and her husband could get involved and help welcome home other people's children from their deployments, and if Tim started to ride along for the welcome homes, "maybe God would protect him because he was riding for such an important cause."

The Rooneys became involved with A Hero's Welcome and the Warriors' Watch Riders, assisting with welcome home celebrations and helping any way they could. Tim Rooney has since become a ride captain with the Warriors' Watch Riders, leading the way for the motorcycles that escort a homecoming hero to the celebration location.

By far the most important homecoming Tim Rooney has ever been a part of was one on Father's Day in June 2011. He rode in front of the pack of dozens of motorcycles that led the way for the welcome home for his stepson, Anoushian, after his third deployment, this one for seven months in Afghanistan. The persistent grin on Rooney's face faded only when he spoke of the worry and fear he experienced each day his son was overseas.

"Every day coming down the steps while he was deployed, the first thing I would do is peek out over that Blue Star (flag in the front window)," Rooney said, tears streaming out from under his sunglasses. Rooney said he looked past the star, the unofficial symbol indicating their family had a child who was deployed, and made sure "there were no vehicles out here, you know," to notify him his son had been injured or killed while serving.

Michele Rooney said that feeling of having people there to welcome home your hero is amazing, paralleled only by being part of a welcome home for someone else's child.

She said her son's second deployment overseas, during which he spent eight months in Afghanistan, was difficult. It was among the most deadly spans of time for U.S. servicemen.

The fear for his safety was still there like it was during his first deployment, "but it was different because we had organizations like A Hero's Welcome and the Warriors' Watch Riders," she said. "We had avenues to focus our energy," she said. "I felt, we felt like we were making use of our time and doing something for our troops," which helped them get through having their son away from home again.

Rooney said she always thought of herself as a patriotic person, but she's never felt as invested as when she works with A Hero's Welcome.

"First of all, it has given us the opportunity to show our younger children the meaning of giving back," she said, speaking of Anoushian's two younger brothers. "It is also an avenue to show them and teach them about the veterans of our country and where our freedoms come from."

Having completed three deployments, Anoushian is currently serving at Camp Pendleton in California.

Asked how many welcome home celebrations she has participated in, Rooney's answer is "not as many as I want to."

In the 12 days from April 1 to April 12, 2012, 13 Americans were killed while serving in the military, and Michele Rooney is angry. "Have you heard about one of them on the news?" she said. "You hear about the actors and the movie stars, but you don't hear about our 21-year-old Marines who are bravely giving their lives."

Sharon Hyland-Keyser is now married to a Marine and is serving as a first lieutenant in the Marines as director of public affairs at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort in Beaufort, S.C. She said it's amazing to see what has transpired since A Hero's Welcome got its small start.

"This July will be five years since we started A Hero's Welcome, so it's been pretty incredible what's happened in these five years," she said. "I was only a part of doing those Hero's Welcomes in the beginning ... My mom has made it much better than I ever thought."

Hyland-Keyser said she often tells her mom to delegate some of the responsibility and not to work too hard. "But she always tells me 'I don't mind making the sacrifice because these men and women make a sacrifice,'" she said. Because the service of our military members is never-ending, so too is the work of A Hero's Welcome and the Warriors' Watch Riders.

"A lot of people think the war is over, it's not over," Maria Hyland said, sitting in her Gilbertsville, home in between planning welcome home celebrations and working at her family business. "We're here to support the troops, so as long as there's military, we're here to support them.

"We'll be happy when all the troops come home, but they're probably just going somewhere else," she said.

And when they return from wherever that is, A Hero's Welcome and the Warriors' Watch Riders will be there.

(Editor's note: This feature story about two Pottstown area organizations is featured as part of American Homecomings, a national news project of Digital First Media. You can view the online presentation of this story, as well as the stories of nine war veterans and a searchable database of resources for the military and their families at www.americanhomecomings.com).